- The young, who don't have credit cards and maybe not even non parent controlled bank accounts but want to send someone money. What better way than bitcoin?

- The embarrassed, who probably don't want payments to a porn web site appearing on their credit card statement.

- The 'legally challenged', who want to order illegal goods, pay for an illegal service or just want to move money with an added layer of obscurity (tax evasion, money laundering, etc).

The rest don't really matter. Bitcoin will never be popular as long as it's a geek's toy, or used on the basis of libetarian ideals. I expect the above three groups to drive bitcoin's adoption (or failure, if they're just not interested).

Those might be the drivers at this point, as libertarians ideals and geek interest were the drivers when bitcoin was just an idea. But when/if the Bitcoin economy develops due to those drivers, Bitcoin will become a very real and efficient way of sending money around the world and as it grows more merchants will see the utility of accepting it.

But Blockexplorer is there, for all of us. I think you'll have to "laundry" your rich wallet.

Whose talking about laundering money? I am just talking about securing your bitcoins.

Because the bad guy can see the history of transactions of your "everyday" wallet. If there something suspicious, like big transfers for only one address, it's a problem. You can manually "laundry" your money generating new addresses in every transaction at your "savings" wallet. Make it little chunks at a time, with broken numbers. (Just a little paranoid right now.)

In future versions of the client, Bitcoin should look more like an user-friendly password-protected crypto-currency with plausible-deniability of it's existence (multiple hidden volumes). OR kids in school should learn how to protect and secure a digital file right now.

It's very hard to be your own bank, but i'm loving every minute of it.

Yes, an attacker could see that you transfered money from one account (the "rich" one) to the day to day account, so what? It would be extremelly difficult for him to attack you just in the precise moment you fire up your computer with the USB and the minute you need to transfer funds to your day to day account to use them. Specially since he/she has no idea when are you going to do it and it could be months or years for you to use that USB. And then he would have to detect the new computer, find out the operating system and hack it in a few minutes. And if you are very paranoic you could to it in your neightbour computer that has a different internet conexion.

There is no system 100% secure, not even the network at the Pentagon, but the odds of someone fucking you if you do this are very very low.

You can't get rid of greedy people. You can eliminate their structures of power.

Such as private property?

Without private property people are still greedy.

For example, if you choose to decide everything in an assembly, apart from being poverty exploitation because its so inefficient you are condenming everybody to be poor, the more rethorical and politcally skilled will do better than the rest. Its political darwinism. So you will still have greed.

PS: Btw, a system of assemblies still needs to have property divissions for the different assemblies, unles you are decided to condemn all humanity to starve to death by having a unique world assembly.

But Blockexplorer is there, for all of us. I think you'll have to "laundry" your rich wallet.

Whose talking about laundering money? I am just talking about securing your bitcoins.

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No. USB sticks are phenomenally likely to break or corrupt your data. Or get stolen, lost etc.

1. Security copies are a must, and that is independently of anything else. You can use this USB method and still have your wallet saved in other way or even encryupted in some online storage service.

2. Yes, if they break into your home they can steal you from you. You might want to have your bitcoins somewhere sfe. Its always a trade off of security vs commodity vs cost of keep it secure. But this is true for any kind of money, not only Bitcoin.

AFAIK windows has a tool, trix or something, where you can overvolt and stuff, thats somethingmissing for linux.

It depends on the card manufacturer. I had a Asus 5870 that allowed me to go to 1200Mhz core speed without wihout flahsing (in reality I could not go over 1010 without the card becoming unstable). And then I had a XFX 5870 that only allowed me to go to 900Mhz core speed, and had to flash it.

Why is the world's reserve currency the US$? That's what the Allied industrialised countries agreed upon in 1944 with the Bretton Woods agreement. The system ended in 1971 but by then the dollar was too important to world trade, so the defacto reserve status continued. The USA was also the primary oil producer in the world (Japan went to war with the USA after the US blocked supply).

The US dollar has many problems, but no one really has a better system. The Euro? That's beginning to look quite fragile after little more than a decade. Yuan? Tied mainly to the US$. Gold? The only people advocating gold are the ones sitting on bullion bars talking their book. The only thing that's certain is that bitcoin won't make any difference to world events.

They did not agree on it. USA had the industry intact and the military might to impose the dollar as reserve currency while Europe was devasted. In fact, the USA government had been trying to impose the dollar on other countries for decades, from late XIX century, early XX century. It all started with the progressive movement when they created the american imperialist mentality. Their moto was: "Extend democracy over the world". The USA imposed the dollar on Mexico, Cuba, Philiphines and more. They even tried to impose the dollar in China but failed. Most of this efforst were supported by military actions, basically totally or partially invading those countries.

So at the end of the IWW the USA government and the interests around it saw the perfect oportunity and imposed the dollar in the world. There is a reason why the USA has military bases all over the world.

Thinking that the rest of the countries agreed to use the dollar is extremely naive. In fact, most of the countries have complained about the dollar as rserve currency, but at the end nobody dares to do nothing about it.

Promoting USB memory sticks with a linux OS and a bitcoin wallet is better idea.

You have two wallets, the day to day one in your normal computer and the "rich" one, with most of your funds in the USB. When you want to transfer funds from the "rich" wallet you turn off the computer, insert the USB and turn on the computer so it loads the OS from the USB. Then you transfer the funds, close the computer and remove the USB.

Bitcoin is a community not a company, but marketing wise it would be a good idea to look at some ideas from the corporate world on how to handle different issues. The attacks on Bitcoin are getting anoying.

I work at AMD as a beta card tester, we've been testing the new 7xxx prototype for a while,past few days I install a grid miner to about 10k of these cards for the heck of it.didn't know it would cause so many issue for you gaise, sorri.

Hahah, trolls are getting certainly creative.

PS: Just in the 0.1% chance you are for real, you didnt cause any problem, I was just curious.

2-3 months ago the answer was mining. Right now it seems the answer is trading. Buying new mining rigs is getting incredibly risky, since the competition is crahing the margins at alarming rate. Also, you have all this talk about fpga's and dedicated bitcoin mining chips coming soon, which would basiclly render any hardware bought now obsolete for bitcoin mining.

Was thinking about buying a gaming rig before finding out about the bitcoin. Now I'm thinking, hmm, what about a hybrid gaming/mining? Does that sound feasible?

Buying a AMD card instead of a Nvidia card so you can mine makes all the sense. Buying more cards to mine is up to you. Do the numbers, electricity cost vs expected difficulty and bitcoin exchange price. Bitcoin difficulty went up around 50% recenlty after only 8 days since the previous rise. Now it seems there is going to be another rise of around 50% in 10 days and that could get higher if more mining power is added to the network.

2-3 months ago the answer was mining. Right now it seems the answer is trading. Buying new mining rigs is getting incredibly risky, since the competition is crahing the margins at alarming rate. Also, you have all this talk about fpga's and dedicated bitcoin mining chips coming soon, which would basiclly render any hardware bought now obsolete for bitcoin mining.

Well, if the market stays true to the theory of deflation. Then a bitcoin at 20 dollars could be a bargain millions wished they had taken.

Bitcoin price depends on supply and demand. There will be price deflation if the demand for bitcoins goes up more than the supply. Since the suply of bitcoins is very limited and will be more and more limited as time goes by, IF the Bitcoin economy develops thus increasing the demand for bitcoins, it is expected that bitcoins will be price deflationary. But it is not a given. And certainly it is not a short term process.